Marianne looked back from the window and found Dorrie halfway across the room. ‘Are you alright? We should stop this if it’s upsetting for you.’
‘It’s OK, I’m fine.’
Dorrie looked angrily at Libman but resumed her seat.
‘So, do you remember anything now?’ said Libman, staring intently at Marianne with his bulging eyes.
‘Yes, you are right. There was a lot of talk about David.’
‘And do you remember now who David was?’
‘I think his real name was Aleshkovsky.’
‘Yes, it was. Leon Davydovitch Aleshkovsky. And you should remember, shouldn’t you? After all, he is referred to in your confession.’
‘My confession?’
‘This document,’ said Libman, placing several pages of typescript in front of Marianne.
‘God, you’ve got hold of that load of nonsense,’ she said, without picking up the paper.
‘You may have thought of it as a load of nonsense, but it featured prominently at his trial. Would you like to read what you said?’ Marianne didn’t move, so Libman stepped forward to retrieve the document. Turning over several pages he began to read, ‘“I confirm that the person referred to as David during my conversations with the spy Anderson was the Soviet scientist Leon Aleshkovsky. The CIA and Mossad were conspiring, with Aleshkovsky’s cooperation, to bring him to Israel.”’
Libman looked up from the document. ‘You put your name to those two sentences.’
By now Dorrie was halfway across the room. ‘You must stop this at once. You are upsetting Mrs Davenport. All this is ancient history. You of all people should know that the KGB could make up anything they liked. All those old Soviet show trials relied on fabricated evidence. I expect they wrote in those sentences after it was signed anyway.’
Libman ignored Dorrie’s intervention. ‘Would you like to have another look at the statement? This is a photocopy, of course, but it has your signature on each page. Is it a fabrication or a copy of the document you signed?’
Dorrie was now beside the desk. ‘Really, I must protest…’
Marianne held up her hand to Dorrie. She smiled at her and for a few seconds no one spoke. Then she turned back to Libman. ‘Yes. I signed it.’
‘You alleged that Aleshkovsky was cooperating with the Americans and the Israelis – how could you know that?’
‘I assumed…’
‘Assumed? That was enough? You didn’t know for sure?’
‘No.’
‘But you still signed.’
Marianne shrugged.
‘A few weeks in – what was it? – something like a cheap hotel was enough for you to condemn a man you had never met. Did you ever try to find out what had happened to this man you had so casually accused? I suppose it didn’t matter to you. You were just thinking of yourself. Shall I tell you what happened? He was tried for treason. Your statement was a big part of the evidence against him. Did you think…’
‘Out. Out now!’ Dorrie had Libman by the arm and was tugging him up. ‘We are not going to listen to you anymore. Anna. Anna!’ In less time than it took Marianne to rise to her feet, Anna had arrived to seize Libman’s other arm.
‘Ladies, please. Please let go of me. I am leaving now.’ Turning back to Marianne he said, ‘I understand. It was just a trivial matter to you. But it wasn’t trivial to him. He got ten years. Ten years’ hard labour. Still, he only served seven.’
By now Dorrie and Anna had let go of Libman and stood back while he put his papers back in his briefcase. Marianne was also standing.
‘Only seven years because he died in the labour camp. So it wasn’t trivial for him. And it wasn’t trivial for his five-year-old daughter who never saw him again. Rosa Aleshkovsky. Now Rosa Libman. My mother.’
18
Jake was looking forward to a weekend out of London – and the early July weather looked promising; it was his mother’s birthday on the Sunday and his own birthday the following day, so usually his parents would make it a family event and on this occasion they had invited not only his Grandmother Claire and Great-Aunt Marianne, but Callum and Helen as well.
There had been times in his teenage years when he had resented the arrival of the two oldie sisters – Granny Claire and Auntie Manne – and he and his sister Fran had shared many private jokes at their expense. ‘Two of Pharaoh’s cows have escaped,’ she had once whispered to him. ‘A fat one and a skinny one.’ But now he was pleased that the house would be full – anything was better than the claustrophobic intimacy of their family threesome when Fran’s empty chair still cast its chilly shadow over every meal.
It was nearly midnight before he arrived at his parents’ house. Everyone seemed to have gone to bed except his father who was having a whisky in front of the television. Jake warmed some left-over lasagne in the microwave, poured himself a glass of red wine and sat down to chat to his father. Half an hour later he went to his room while his father locked the house.
It happened on the way to the bathroom. From the end of the dark corridor – Jake knew the house too well to need to turn on the landing light – the door of Fran’s room opened, and the profile of a teenage girl emerged and stood looking at him, immobile within the deep shadows cast by the light from his bedroom. A small involuntary gurgle sounded in his throat as he stepped backwards and reached for the light switch. As the bulb slowly illuminated the landing he saw his cousin Leah standing in her pink pants and white tee-shirt watching him from the doorway of Fran’s room.
‘Jesus…’
‘Sorry, did I give you a shock…?’
‘It’s just… no one told me you were here.’
‘Oh – sorry. I was just going to the bathroom.’
‘Of course – it’s that door… and… well… talk in the morning,’ and in so saying, Jake stepped back into his room, closed the door and threw himself onto the bed. Fuck, he thought, why the fuck didn’t anyone tell me she was staying? Had he thought for a second…? No, of course not, it was just that… coming out of Fran’s room in the dark. The room was not a shrine – far from it, others had slept there – but in his mind it would always be her room. Indeed, they all referred to it as Fran’s room, though the only reminder of Fran left in it was an over-large portrait of her done shortly before her death as part of an A-level art project by a fellow pupil. Her face occupied almost a whole wall; it was a confident pose – as it had every right to be for a girl who had achieved much in her short life – but to Jake there now seemed an unmistakable sadness in her eyes – as if she had some premonition that her life would soon be cut short. It was a long time before he fell asleep.
Partly it was the smell, a hint of dampness, an indefinable whiff of decay mixed with the scent of the New Dawn roses flowering under his window; then there was the bed, the soft springiness under the starched white sheets; most of all, though, it was the sound, the distant groaning of the shore as the sea pounded the shingle beach half a mile across the fields from the front of the house. Without opening his eyes, Jake sensed the familiarity of his old bedroom and he let the memories flood back.
She is standing over him, shaking him awake. No words are spoken but he slips out of bed, puts on his trainers, pulls a hoody over his pyjama top and follows her down the back stairs, out of the side door and into the yard. He can hear nothing above his furiously beating heart as they creep across the concrete paving, over a small wall and suddenly they are running, running silently over the damp grass towards the gate in the privet hedge. The night is cloudy and alarmingly dark. He knows she will have brought a torch but she won’t shine it till they are further from the house. Misjudging the line to the gate, Jake puts a foot into the corner of a flower bed and falls heavily onto the grass. In a second he is up again and following her through the gate. Closing it behind them they duck down behind the hedge and recover their breath. She smiles at him and in the darkness he can just see the silver line of the braces across her front teeth.